favorite recipes from a Northwest kitchen

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If your house is anything like mine, your floor is littered with hearts and stickers, confetti and sparkles, the uncontainable detritus of the month-long operation that consumes our home at this time every year: making Valentines. The glue! The glitter! The little girls cutting hearts and hearts and hearts and hearts, and the thousands of tiny scraps of paper that float to every corner of the floor! The never-ending sweeping….

I mostly try to just smile and nod, enjoying the spectacle and vaguely hoping that we’ll manage to reclaim the table in time for dinner each night. As you probably know, I prefer to make my own messes in the kitchen.

Today is one of those nice days where a lot of people I love are together under one roof. My in-laws are visiting, and my brother and his wife are passing through town with our favorite nephew (also, yes, only nephew). I got to putter around in the garden for a while, sneaking up on weeds and picking ingredients for this salad while my mother-in-law, who is an amazing cook, made the rest of the meal.

I know I once said I couldn’t tolerate a one-color meal, but it turns out that maybe I can if the color is springtime green. I wish that I had taken a picture of it all together, but you will just have to imagine how lovely the table looked with this salad alongside a bright green pea-and-basil soup and followed by an equally brilliant avocado mousse. So green!

The top left picture below is the creamy cilantro and sweet corn dressing that I used for the salad. It’s just corn, cilantro, lime, and salt, but it has such a creamy texture and bright, sweet flavor that I’m already thinking about how else I’m going to use it this summer. Suggestions, as always, are warmly welcomed–you guys have such good ideas, thank you for sharing them!

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There’s something about environmentally-unfriendly single-serving packaged snacks that children find irresistible. Maybe it’s the “all mine” factor, or the satisfying crinkle of those little bags, but it’s hard to compete with a store-bought granola bar for my kids’ affection in the snack category.

These bars did the trick partly because they were fun and hands-on to make, and partly because they’re basically cookies. Mmm, cookies. This recipe, from Good to the Grain, was a great starting point–chewy, sweet and oaty–but I expect to do a little experimentation in the future to find a granola bar that comes closer to being a healthy kid snack. On the other hand, these would make a great hiking snack if you actually needed a sugar boost, and I quite enjoyed them as an afternoon sweet alongside a cup of tea. We’ll just be calling them “cookies” from now on.

The truth about how J and I met is kind of boring, so we usually make something up when people ask us. For a long time we used to say that we’d met in an internet chat room, back when that sounded scandalous, but now everyone meets online and we have to be more creative. We met underwater off the Great Barrier Reef? We were seated side by side for jury duty in small claims court? We both worked at Baskin Robbins in high school?

That last one is true, actually, although the establishments in question were thousands of miles apart. But it proves an important point: we have a long history with ice cream around here.

So I am well-qualified to tell you that this one is outstanding. I already sang its praises here, but I feel wrong depriving you of this recipe for Seattle’s iconic ice cream flavor from Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream. Especially since, get this, you don’t need an ice cream maker to make it. Some magic having to do with the salt and the cream keeps the texture sublime, even if you make it with a pan and fork instead (directions below). If you do have an ice cream maker, you can save yourself a few minutes of stirring. Either way, this recipe will make your summer better. And probably the entire rest of your life.Continue reading Salted Caramel Ice Cream (click for recipe)

Well, the nice thing about this endless Seattle gloom is that the lettuce isn’t bolting.

When I first moved to Seattle, J and I lived in a tiny house, and one of the first things we did was put in a tiny garden. We built four raised beds in the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street. Everyone does that now, I know, but this was more than a decade ago and I liked to think of us as pioneering urban farmers back then. (We got chickens too, of course.)

There was just one problem. I’m from California. And when I moved to Seattle, I was cold. I consulted with my local garden store about what kind of vegetables I could grow in this inhospitable climate and planted things like lettuce, arugula, and broccoli. And then I bundled them up as warm as I could. I put hoops over the beds and sheathed them in clear plastic, trapping the heat to create toasty little greenhouses for my tender plants. They thought it was high summer and went happily straight to seed, of course. Learning that some plants prefer cooler temperatures was the beginning of my education about the benefits that a cool climate has to offer. (Others include not needing much of a summer wardrobe, only needing an air conditioner a few days each year, and the blueberries. Oh, the blueberries!)

In any case, delightful lettuces grow in this part of the world nearly year-round. They are floppy or pert, frilly or reserved, pastel green, deep maroon, or freckled. They are the stars of the show at springtime farmers markets, and I find them irresistible. Here’s a nice thing to do with any sturdy, crunchy lettuce. (Romaine is the classic, of course, as we’re riffing on the Caesar salad here, but it gets much more exciting than that.)Continue reading Sorta-Ceasar Salad (click for recipe)

Let’s start with this: I’m not at all above feeding my kids a box of mac and cheese, or declaring that it’s leftover night and wishing everyone good luck, or piling us all into the car to go out for ramen. But I do try to make dinner for my family with some frequency.

Do you know this nice blog called “Dinner: A Love Story“? I was just introduced to it recently. It’s all about feeding your family dinner every night and of course they have a new cookbook (who doesn’t these days?), apparently full of recipes and strategies for feeding a family of picky eaters without going crazy. I should probably get that cookbook.

But in the meantime I thought I’d share a tip of my own. One of the ways in which I manage to get dinner on the table on a regular basis is by using the term “dinner” fairly loosely. Some examples: breakfast for dinner? Sure. Sandwiches? If necessary. Tonight’s dinner? These pretzels. The girls gleefully chose their own dips (peanut butter, rhubarb jam, and applesauce), and the grown-ups had theirs with a sweet grainy mustard. I made a pot of that great turnip soup soup as well, but it was certainly the accompaniment to the pretzels and not the other way around.It’s a little time-consuming to make pretzels (you boil these in a baking-soda bath in addition to letting them rise twice), but it was a fun project to do with the girls and the resulting pretzels were very good. They have just the right combination of crispy bottom and chewy center, with a little tang that I assumed was from the rye flour, but Kim Boyce tells me is from the baking soda instead. This recipe is adapted from Boyce’s Good to the Grain cookbook, which I want to cook from front to back after having started with those Rhubarb-Strawberry Cornmeal Tarts recently.

I usually joke that mine is the ability to cook when it’s messy (it’s always messy), but in truth I think it’s that I like to eat. So as I cook, I ask myself, does this taste good? What would make it better? Do I want a finely chopped vegetable here, or big chunks? This description makes my cooking sound more planned-out than it usually is, but I just mean that these are the things that go through my head on the fly. I believe that constantly thinking about the end product and tasting occasionally as I go increase my chances of producing something delicious. (There are plenty of failures too, of course–I’ve been thinking lately that I should start taking pictures of those as well for an Emmy Cooks bloopers reel.)

But this ability to envision the eventual dish fails me when it comes to cuisines that I am less comfortable cooking. Indian food falls into this category, which is why I appreciate starting with a good recipe that will rely less on my intuition and more on my ability to follow directions. So mostly I stick to recipes from Vij’s At Home. But dazzled by the success of that saag paneer I keep making (thank you, Kolpona Cuisine!), I decided to branch out to this aloo gobi recipe from the gorgeous vegan blog v:gourmet. I followed the recipe exactly, except for the splash of cream I added at the end. What can I say? My super power told me to.

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